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The City Council is working to make Harvard Square more appealing and inviting for small and local retailers by updating zoning that hasn’t been changed in almost a half century.

A strip of prime Harvard Square properties sold Monday for $108 million to a North Carolina-based real estate investment company, three months after hitting the market.

Firefighters battled and extinguished a two-alarm blaze that broke out at the Border Café in Harvard Square during the Sunday lunchtime rush, authorities said.

The Head of the Charles Regatta, an annual crew pilgrimage to Harvard Square, brought more than 250,000 spectators and 11,000 rowers to Cambridge this weekend to take in the sights and sample local businesses’ offerings.

Out of Town News officially shut its doors for good on October 31, according to multiple reports. “We are like family,” Mohammed Rahman, who has worked at Out of Town for 22 years, said of his coworkers on the newsstand’s last day in operation.

The longtime owner of Harvard Square’s Curious George store is selling the highly visible brick-and-mortar business as the store moves to another Cambridge neighborhood.

The first solo artist gallery of Harvard Square has arrived. On Sept. 18, Cambridge painter Susan Miller-Havens opened her collection to the public, titling the event “Now You See It Now You Don’t” as tribute to the ever-changing landscape of the Square and the power of art.  Located at 9 JFK Street, between The Curious George Store and Urban Outfitters, this space has historically housed pop-up shops and short-lived shoe stores, like Mudo and Karhu. But now, the one-room gallery displays upwards of 30 Miller-Havens’ paintings, spanning her career from early surrealist abstracts to her more recent works, which are intimate portraits of two or three people. Painting prices range from around $1,000 to $11,000.

Some kids have Manhattan.  Others have Hollywood.   As a kid growing up west of Boston in the 1980s and 1990s, I had Harvard Square.  I remember driving into Cambridge along Alewife Brook Parkway with my parents as a 1980s elementary schoolers, peering out the window past the Fresh Pond Mall sign and Faces nightclub, en route to Joyce Chen’s Chinese restaurant – the pinnacle of authentic dining back then. 

A little over a year after the flame of Les Sablons’ kitchen brought the historic 1912 Conductor’s Building “to life,” the upscale French restaurant cooled off its stove tops for the last time Thursday.  A message on Les Sablons’ website gave no reason for the restaurant’s closure, instead thanking its staff and patrons.  “We look forward to seeing all your familiar faces at our sister restaurants throughout New England,” the statement reads.